Answer

The Gods saw this as a great crime which Prometheus committed as he was one of the Titans who lighted his torch at the chariot of the sun, and brought it to man. He was punished terribly and chained to a rock where a bird of prey fed on his liver. (Usually the bird is depicted as a vulture, but Simon Armitage may have Prometheus in mind when he writes “picked at by their eagles”). The speaker in the poem, it seems, has done something wrong which, in the eyes of “those bastards”, is like bringing fire to ordinary men and women - “heat and light”, and the knowledge of how to lose their “cuffs and shackles” and turn them into weapons.